Lamatia handed Dr. Hamilton a clipboard as they walked down the sterile white hallway. “It’s down on the receiving dock. Too big to get into one of the exam rooms.”
Hamilton glanced down at the giant fairy. “Big, huh? Human intelligence?”
Lamatia waggled his head. “Sort of. Can’t hardly get it to shut up with its stupid riddles, and its handler is being careful not to leave it alone so it doesn’t kill anyone. He has to keep reminding the thing that it’s not at home, guarding the family jewels.”
Hamilton flipped through the charts. “This is really supposed to be a medical problem?”
“So they say.”
“‘They’ being…”
“The handler is some sort of pharaoh prince. The sphinx is bound to him somehow and does what he tells it to. It’s his coffers the thing apparently guards. Been in the family for three thousand years, he says.”
Hamilton whistled. “Good rejuvenation mechanisms, I guess. Vamps do that well. I wonder if the sphinx is using a similar process.”
Lamatia winced at the use of the diminutive ‘vamps’, even though he knew Hamilton used to date one, off and on, and so might be excused for the familiar usage. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It clanks when it moves.”
“Hmm.” Hamilton perused the clipboard as they walked down the hallway. “Riddles are out of sync? What do you think that means?”
The fairy shrugged, a motion amplified by the lumpy wings concealed under its coat, giving him a hunchbacked appearance. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Every time I asked a question, the sphinx asks one back, and won’t answer anything else until I come up with an answer to his stupid riddle. Which I haven’t done successfully, I might add. Really exasperating.”
They walked through the double doors onto the receiving dock together. Off to the left was an enclosed storage area with a roll-up door, and a personnel door to the side. “Over there,” Lamatia said.
There was a small crowd on the dock looking expectantly at the roll-up door, as though the sphinx might explode out of it at any moment. Piles of boxes were stacked outside the roll-up door to make room for the sphinx inside. Hamilton nodded to Medjine at the admittance desk facing the rear of the building. At Backside Clinic, all the supernatural customers entered via the alley door, which was carefully glyphed by a local witch so normals would ignore it. Medjine nodded back, her eyes showing narrowly through wrapped layers of cloth, an affectation that conveniently hid all of the decaying bits of her body. A sandalwood incense stick burned nearby to help cover the odor. Ventilation fans carried away the worst of it. Even the undead needed work, and how many businesses dealt with this segment of society?
Hamilton entered the large room with Lamatia in tow.
The sphinx was large, filling a good portion of the storage area. Standing next to him was the prince, dressed casually in loose-fitting slacks, penny loafers, and a silk shirt. “Doctor Hamilton?” he asked. Next to him was the sphinx, who looked down at Hamilton and Lamatia, and snorted. The smell of oil and burned wire filled the room. Hamilton raised an eyebrow as he took in the sphinx. The sphinx was mostly brown, with reddish-amber eyes. Its skin looked like a cross between sandstone, brown fur, and rust, while its claws appeared to be no more than an extension of the rest of its hard body. It slid its tail across the floor, making a sound like a jeep driving down a dry gravel creek bed.
He approached the prince. “Hi. I’m Dr. Hamilton. This is my nurse, Lamatia.”
The prince nodded. “I am Prince Abdul al-Debaran. And this is my sphinx.”
Hamilton glanced at his clipboard. “And he has a problem… with his memory?”
“Yes, he…”
“I do speak, you know,” said the sphinx. Its voice rumbled like a bass drum.
The prince glared at the sphinx. “And he interrupts me constantly. If you have a medical treatment for that…”
“So you can just ask me what the problem is,” continued the sphinx. “Please. I’m all ears.”
Hamilton cleared his throat. Lamatia waved his hand to get his attention. Hamilton bent over while Lamatia whispered urgently in his ear. “Oh yes… asking questions is a bit of an issue here, isn’t it?” Hamilton said.
The sphinx’s ears twitched forward, stone appearing to flex like candle wax. “Was that a question?”
“No, no, just a rhetorical comment.” He looked at the clipboard. “It says here your riddles are out-of-sync. Can you explain—or rather—please tell me what that means.”
The prince nodded respectfully at the artful twist of a question into a command. The sphinx raised the corner of one rocky lip. “It began nearly four hundred years ago. You understand I don’t get a lot of visitors, so it took a while before I or my master figured out that there was a problem. The prince observed me consuming a man even though he answered the riddle correctly…”
“A servant,” the prince interrupted, dismissively waving a hand.
Hamilton glanced between Prince Abdul and the sphinx. “Ah, well, that’s all right, then.” Neither of them noticed his sarcasm. He tapped his clipboard and frowned. “You mentioned that your sphinx is ‘out of sync’?”
“Yes. A few more riddles established that the answers he wants are for two riddles later than the riddle he asked. They are mismatched—staggered, offset. If they were offset in the other direction, this would not be much of an issue. The servants could just record the answers it gives two riddles ahead of time and provide those answers to get past it during their duties, and the thieves… well, it would just provide an extra level of inconvenience for them. But as it stands, the sphinx asks a riddle now, but in response, expects the answer to a riddle it will ask two riddles from now, which is inconvenient for everyone.”
“And if the person gets a riddle wrong…”
“The sphinx eats them, assuming I am not there to control its base impulses.”
Hamilton looked up at the sphinx, who smiled a toothy quartz smile at him. Turning back to Prince Abdul, he said, “This doesn’t exactly strike me as a medical issue. Why did you think I could cure it of this malady?”
“You have quite a reputation in the supernatural community. There are stories about you that are frankly unbelievable, I admit, but this is certainly worth a try. I am quite fond of my sphinx.”
Matthew Hamilton tapped his clipboard with a pen, a tiny rhythm that he ended with a snap of the clip. He prided himself on weeding out the supernatural mumbo-jumbo of each case and digging down to the roots of the natural causes. He was a cynic surrounded by the supernatural, mechanistically devolving each bizarre illness into its mundane natural elements with the thorough insight of a scientist, pulling the sense from the nonsense. The things he couldn’t explain, well, those were the things he just hadn’t looked at closely enough yet. Everything had an explanation.
“You understand, I hope, that we have a policy here about patients not being in the business of killing people. Things that go bump in the night have to forego their bumping-off tendencies before we cure them of their ailments. If we heal a werewolf, we have to be sure that it isn’t going to run out and snack on a bunch of locals on his way out of town. In your case, you have to swear that your sphinx isn’t going to be consuming any more humans, and that you will take measures to remedy your creature’s diet.”
The prince frowned, cleared his throat and swallowed. “Swear how?”
“We have some documents to sign.” Written by our onsite contract demon, who has some expertise in the matter, Hamilton thought.
“Ah, well. I can certainly do that.” He smiled again dismissively, his voice full of disdain.
Hamilton stared at him for a moment before saying anything else, just to make the man nervous. “I’ll hold you to that.” The prince’s smile became somewhat strained. “Do you know how the Sphinx was created or spawned originally?” he asked the prince.
“How? Not in any detail. A magician working under Khafre created this one, some 4500 years ago. His techniques have been lost or hidden away in Khafre’s tomb. Either way, they are long gone.”
“Too bad.” Hamilton walked around the sphinx, who tracked him with its crimson eyes. There were no openings or panels in the beast besides its mouth, no joints where stones connected. When the sphinx rolled a shoulder, the apparent stone surface stretched and compressed like taffy. He reached out and touched the skin. It was cool and hard, and gritty like sandstone. He turned to the prince. “When it… eats… does it excrete?”
The prince looked startled and pulled at his short beard. “You know, I am not certain. There has never been a need to, well, clean anything up. So perhaps not. Perhaps those that he eats become part of him.”
“Hmm.” Hamilton continued to circle the sphinx, inspecting it. He came to a stop in front of it, the sphinx staring down at him impassively. “Do you mind if I spend a bit of time alone with it?”
The prince frowned. “It’s quite dangerous. Unless I’m here to override its natural tendencies, I’m afraid it will trick you into asking it a question, and then…”
“Please trust me in this. It will not be a concern.”
Prince Abdul looked doubtful, but shrugged. “Very well. If half the stories about you are true, then perhaps you will survive.”
Hamilton bowed slightly to the prince and said, “Thank you. I will call you in when I’m done. Lamatia, you leave too. I don’t need any casualties today.”
Lamatia nodded and left with the prince.
“Corwin?” Hamilton called to the air.
A ghost materialized in the room. It wore a rakishly tilted fedora and a light-blue suit. “Yes, boss?”
“I need to see inside this creature and I don’t think x-rays are going to cut it.”
Corwin glanced at the sphinx, who stared back at the ghost, unperturbed. “What am I looking for?”
“I think this creature is an ancient computer, like a Babbage machine, but with an artificial intelligence. I would like to know what mechanism inside is out of whack. Perhaps a tiny gear or pulley, some damaged mechanism that should be whole, but isn’t. Probably not a printed circuit board.”
Corwin stuck his head through the side of the sphinx, then pulled back out. “What am I getting paid this time?”
“Isn’t haunting the hospital payment enough?”
“How about some more audio books?” Corwin suggested.
“I’ll see what I can do.” Hamilton said.
Corwin entered the side of the sphinx, then came back out a few seconds later. “It’s dark, and there are lots of mechanical noises, like the inside of a large watch.”
Hamilton rubbed his forehead. “And?”
“And I can’t really see in the dark.”
“Can’t you glow or something?”
“I’m a ghost, Doctor, not a candle.”
Hamilton pulled a small exam-flashlight out of his shirt pocket and turned it on. He sighed. They weren’t cheap. He held it up to the sphinx and said, “Eat this.”
“Not without a riddle. And you attached to it.”
“Do I need to call the Prince back in just to order you to do it?”
The sphinx rolled its eyes. It snapped the flashlight out of his hand, tilted its head back and swallowed.
“Now, Corwin?”
Corwin reentered the sphinx, returning in a few moments, a look of surprise and wonder on its face. “It’s… quite unusual. It’s much larger on the inside than the outside. A vast room, I think. I’d look around a bit more, but I can’t pick up your flashlight, you know. There’s at least one corpse in there that I could see.”
“A room I could stand in?”
“Oh, easily, Doctor Hamilton.”
He looked up at the sphinx’s mouth. One way in. He clutched at the pendant hidden under his shirt, the gift from his vampire girlfriend that kept him from getting torn apart more than once. This would certainly be a test for it. It was the one thing that let him function safely as a doctor to the supernatural community.
“I’m afraid I need to ask you a riddle, sphinx.”
The sphinx jumped up like a puppy, swinging its stone tail back and forth, flipping over pallets and tables.
“Once I’m inside you, how can I get back out again?” Hamilton asked.
The sphinx frowned, leaning over him threateningly. “It must rhyme, human. Else I get to ask the first riddle. You have one more chance.”
What rhymes with escape? Crepe? Gape? Tape? Or with eaten? Beaten, neaten, Wil Wheaton? Hamilton thought hard. He didn’t know how much time he had to compose his poem before the sphinx tried to eat him. Out again, big fat hen.
He smiled and held up a finger. “If you consume me like a grape, what are the means for my escape?”
The sphinx winced. He sat back on his haunches and said, “That’s not a riddle, it’s just a question that rhymes. But I’ll give you points for the iambic tetrameter. Here is my answer; A reversal of fortune will come if you but say it.”
“Wait a second. You answered my question with another riddle?”
The sphinx shrugged, accompanied by the sound of crunching gravel. “You gave me a riddle that was not a riddle. I gave you an answer that was not an answer. It seems fair, does it not? Now, my riddle for you. You have but a minute to ponder it, or I will consume you;
“An answer to all questions,
This proper response we condone.
The truth is undeniable
If the answer is unknown.”
Hamilton already knew the sphinx would try to eat him; in fact, he depended on it; but he was a little disconcerted that he didn’t know how to escape from its innards. A reversal of fortune would come if he said it? What did that mean? If he wanted to continue his medical practice, he’d need to do it from the outside of the sphinx.
“Do you chew a bit before you swallow?” he asked.
The sphinx scraped stone claws against the cement floor, gouging it. Hamilton thought about adding that to the bill. “Is that your answer?” asked the sphinx.
“Just a question. You’re out of sync, anyway, so it’s somewhat irrelevant what answer I give you, isn’t it?”
With that, the sphinx gleefully snapped up Hamilton, tilted its head back, and swallowed him whole. Hamilton held onto his pendant as he slid down a marble-slick gullet, landing on his back on a stack of old clothing. The clothing crunched as he hit it. His previously consumed flashlight, jostled from his impact, rolled around until it swept across the empty eye sockets of a desiccated corpse. He quickly pushed off the dried body and picked himself up, dusting the flakes of bone and skin from his clothes, trying not to breath until the dust settled, and once again grateful for the pendant that Clare had given him. Otherwise, the sphinx would have broken his back when it grabbed him. He pushed his black hair back from his eyes and looked around.
It was, indeed, much bigger on the inside than the outside. His flashlight swept across a blue vest that moved toward him. “Hello!” said the apparition.
Hamilton fell backwards, dropping his flashlight and cursing, then rummaged around on the floor for it. He glared at Corwin. “I really wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“My goals as a ghost today are fulfilled.”
“Ha, ha.” Hamilton retrieved the flashlight and swept its beam around the floor. It was littered with corpses. Most of them appeared to have broken necks or backs. A few of them were piled together near the end of the sphinx’s gullet. Two metal cables were strung up along the inside of the sphinx’s throat, which led back to a diaphragm attached to a large mass of gears. “Voicebox, maybe,” he muttered. “Wow. Prince Abdul really needs a mechanic, not a doctor.” The ghost hovered next to him as he walked around the room examining the mechanisms surrounding him. The machine had layer upon layer of densely packed gears, levers, and springs, the deep complexity of the assembly blocking the flashlight’s penetration after a dozen feet or so. Each wall of the huge room was merely the first layer of a mechanical computing device, fifty feet wide on each side and thirty feet high. A narrow passage at the back beckoned to him.
Treading quietly down the passage, he came to a smaller chamber. Inside was a table with scraps of paper, hieroglyphs and mechanical sketches scribbled upon them, scattered dry remnants littering the floor. A dried inkwell and quills rested in grooved recesses on the table. To the right was a mummified man holding on to the handle of a pickaxe. Above him was a meshed set of metal gears. One of the gears was missing a tooth. He looked around the corpse, and saw the sheared metal tooth lying near the head of the pickaxe. How did he get the pickaxe inside the sphinx? Or was the sphinx just too dumb to realize that eating a man with a pickaxe would give it indigestion?
So, maybe the gear skipped an answer one time, then a hundred years later, it missed another answer, and ended up two behind. That would mean that eventually, given another full rotation of the gear, it’d be off by another answer. The dead man with the pickaxe couldn’t have known what he was doing, angry and confused, swinging in the dark.
Hamilton bent over the corpse. It looked like he had a broken back, too, like many of the other corpses. Dried-out blisters covered his face and skin like small craters. What had caused that? It must have been a brutal struggle to crawl this far into the machine. Why? He stood up, looking around. “Corwin, any idea why this guy crawled all the way back here instead of whacking the first wall he came to?”
The ghost shrugged. “Try turning off your flashlight. If the man saw something in the dark, perhaps you will, too.”
Hamilton smiled. “That’s why I only hire the smartest ghosts.”
“I’m getting paid?”
Hamilton switched off his flashlight. About five feet beyond the damaged gear, he could make out a dim blue glow. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness. The glow was at the core of a web of glass and metal. Steel tubes led away from it to other parts of the machine. “Oh, that’s not good.”
“What?”
“It’s probably the power source. My guess is that it’s something with a half-life.” He looked down at the corpse near him with the blistered face. “And without much shielding. We’ve got to get out of here.” Unless the pendant could protect him from radiation, too, but he suspected not.
“Are these the riddles?” Corwin asked from behind him.
Hamilton glanced back at the opposite wall of the chamber where Corwin was hovering. A series of fifty disks were slotted into metal slots, a large disk above and smaller disk below. Hieroglyphs were written next to each one. “Could be. And these little marks look like they could be numbers.” He pulled out a copper disk. It was covered with small Braille-like dimples. “If I just move the small disks over by two, it might be back in sync. For a number of years, anyway. Then, the sphinx can go back to…hmm. Eating people properly.” He started moving all the smaller disks over two spaces in their slots, verifying from the numbering that he was shifting everything the right direction. He stepped back, pulled out his cell-phone, and took a dozen quick pictures of the hieroglyphs.
“What are you doing?” asked Corwin.
“I’ve got an idea. Help me find the freshest corpse in here.”
“You have the only flashlight.”
Hamilton took a breath and let it out slowly.
“Alright. Then take that riddle about ‘reversal of fortune’ up to the Oracle and ask her what it means. We, or rather I, still need to get out of here.”
Corwin disappeared.
Hamilton rummaged through the pockets of the man with the pickaxe, finding a wallet with documents and currency nearly two hundred years old. He left the room and kept searching for the least mummified body. One of them seemed a bit less desiccated than the others, the dried rind of his eyes staring like little prunes from the sockets. He searched the man’s pockets. A small hand-drawn map was in one pocket, along with a letter with an address and a postmark only fifty years old. A rope was tangled with one shoulder bone and a knife rested in a thin leather sheath. This might work, Hamilton thought. If the little map and rope were any indication, the man could have been a thief looking to plunder whatever tomb or treasure the sphinx guarded. If he could track down the guy’s family, they’d probably be ecstatic to be handed the answer sheet for the sphinx’s riddles. And after that, the sphinx wouldn’t be guarding much of anything, would it? No more killing required.
Corwin hadn’t come back yet. Hamilton sniffed at the air and grabbed at the nearest wall as dizziness turned the room around him. He shook his head and looked down at his pendant, realizing he didn’t have a really good grasp on its limitations. Getting chomped on by a sphinx, no prob. Radiation poisoning and oxygen deprivation, not so sure. So, what did the riddle mean, ‘reversal of fortune will come if you say it’? Well, literally, that would mean saying either ‘it’ or ‘enutrof’, wouldn’t it? It couldn’t be that simple, could it? Would he have to say it in Egyptian, or was the meaning adequate? Swaying in the toxic air, he shouted “Enutrof!”
A door suddenly appeared in the side of room. Of course. The designer of this space-time discontinuity would need some way of getting in and out during the design process. Or a way of sneaking out once he was disposed of by the pharaoh of that time, consumed by the very sphinx he created. It was curious that the door opened via a backwards English word, but it could be that the machine had somehow learned to ad-lib in new languages over the centuries, making it an even more amazing mechanical contrivance.
Perhaps the creator died of radiation poisoning afterward, but Hamilton guessed that anyone who could provide power for something as complicated as the Sphinx would have a pretty good understanding of radioactive materials, too.
He ran for the door and flung it open, finding that Prince Abdul and Lamatia were anxiously fretting in the storage room, Abdul wailing that the doctor had foolishly not heeded his warnings. Hamilton stepped out of the dark innards of the sphinx, switched off his flashlight, and closed the door, finding himself exiting at the rear end of the sphinx. At least the designer had a sense of humor, he thought. The seam around the perimeter of the door disappeared.
The sphinx was glaring down at him. Hamilton waved a hand dismissively. “Pfft. Easy riddle.”
Lamatia ran up to the doctor, grabbing his sleeves with both hands. “You’re alive!”
“So it seems. And prince, I believe your sphinx will be able to function normally, now.” And I’ll be long dead by the time it trips up again.
“My family gives you its undying gratitude. Sphinx, give me a riddle.”
The sphinx duly delivered one of its riddles, and when directed by the prince, grudgingly provided the answer. Hamilton breathed a sign of relief; the answer made sense.
His gratitude won’t last long, Hamilton thought. Not when the thief’s family gets the answer sheet to the riddles, unless he keeps his promise to keep the sphinx from eating anyone else. If the sphinx isn’t guarding a vault, it won’t need to eat anyone. And if it is guarding a vault and the prince lied, then he’ll just be out a treasure when the next thief successfully answers all the riddles. One way or the other, he’ll be keeping his promise. Either way, better for him than violating the hospital demon’s contract.
“It was a pleasure, Prince. Lamatia will see you to the receptionist.” He bowed slightly as he shook the prince’s hand, then left the room. Corwin suddenly appeared next to him. “I see you escaped without my help, after all.”
“I figured out the riddle.”
“Fortune, backwards? The Oracle did a web search and found the old riddle in about a minute.”
Hamilton laughed. “Makes you wonder what good an Oracle is.”
“Don’t say that in front of her. She did say something about helping you track down the address in your pocket.” He disappeared into the ceiling.
Medjine, at the receptionist’s desk, held up a folder for him. “Doctor Hamilton, you have a new patient waiting for you in exam room 4.”
“The fun never stops. What is it? Please tell me it’s something I’ve seen before.”
“A variable shapechanger, stuck in one shape,” she said.
“Dare I ask?”
“Think of it as a surprise,” she said, chuckling.
About the Author
Tom Jolly’s stories have previously appeared in Analog, Daily Science Fiction, Perihelion, Something Wicked, and elsewhere. Find him on the web at silcom.com/~tomjolly/tomjolly2.htm.